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FOUR 
AMERICAN LEADERS 



FOUR 
AMERICAN LEADERS 



BY 



CHARLES W. ELIOT 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 22 1906 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS <X XXc, No. 

/ 6 a ^ 4- 

COPY B. 






Copyright, 1906 
American Unitarian Association 



Note 

The four essays in this volume were 
written for celebrations or commemora- 
tions in which several persons took part. 
Each of them is, therefore, only a partial 
presentation of the life and character of 
its subject. The delineation in every case 
is not comprehensive and proportionate, 
but rather portrays the man in some of 
his aspects and qualities. 



Contents 



I. Franklin 



An address delivered before the meeting 
of the American Philosophical Society to 
commemorate the two hundredth anniversary 
of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, Philadel- 
phia, AprU 20, 1906. 

II. Washington 31 

An address given before the Union League 
Club of Chicago at the exercises in commem- 
oration of the birth of Washington, February 
23, 1903. 

III. Channing 57 

An address made at the unveiling of the 
Channing statue on the occasion of the one 
hundredth anniversary of the birth of William 
Ellery Channing, Boston, June 1, 1903. 

IV. Emerson .73 

An address delivered on the commemo- 
ration of the centenary of the birth of Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, Boston, May 24, 1903. 



FRANKLIN 



Four American Leaders 

FRANKLIN 

The facts about Franklin as a printer 
are simple and plain, but impressive. 
His father, respecting the boy's strong 
disinclination to become a tallow-chandler, 
selected the printer's trade for him, after 
giving him opportunities to see members 
of several different trades at their work, 
and considering the boy's own tastes and 
aptitudes. It was at twelve years of age 
that Franklin signed indentures as an ap- 
prentice to his older brother James, who 
was already an established printer. By 
the time he was seventeen years old he 
had mastered the trade in all its branches 
so completely that he could venture, with 
hardly any money in his pocket, first into 



4 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

New York and then into Philadelphia 
without a friend or acquaintance in either 
place, and yet succeed promptly in earn- 
ing his living. He knew all departments 
of the business. He was a pressman as 
well as a compositor. He understood 
both newspaper and book work. There 
were at that time no such sharp subdi- 
visions of labor and no such elaborate 
machinery as exist in the trade to-day ; 
and Franklin could do with his own eyes 
and hands, long before he was of age, 
everything which the printer's art was 
then equal to. When the faithless Gov- 
ernor Keith caused Franklin to land in 
London without any resources whatever 
except his skill at his trade, the youth was 
fully capable of supporting himself in the 
great city as a printer. Franklin had 
been induced by the governor to go to 
England, where he was to buy a complete 



FRANKLIN 5 

outfit for a good printing office to be set 
up in Philadelphia. He had already pre- 
sented the governor with an inventory of 
the materials needed in a small printing 
office, and was competent to make a criti- 
cal selection of all these materials ; yet 
when he arrived in London on this errand 
he was only eighteen years old. Thrown 
completely on his own resources in the 
great city, he immediately got work at a 
famous printing house in Bartholomew 
Close, but soon moved to a still larger 
printing house, in which he remained dur- 
ing the rest of his stay in London. Here 
he worked as a pressman at first, but was 
soon transferred to the composing room, 
evidently excelling his comrades in both 
branches of the art. The customary 
drink money was demanded of him, first 
by the pressmen with whom he was asso- 
ciated, and afterwards by the compositors. 



6 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

Franklin undertook to resist the second 

demand ; and it is interesting to learn that 

after a resistance of three weeks he was 

forced to yield to the demands of the men 

by just such measures as are now used 

against any scab in a unionized printing 

office. He says in his autobiography : 

" I had so many little pieces of private 

mischief done me by mixing my sorts, 

transposing my pages, breaking my matter, 

and so forth, if 1 were ever so little out of 

the room . . . that, notwithstanding the 

master's protection, I found myself obliged 

to comply and pay the money, convinced 

of the folly of being on ill terms with 

those one is to live with continually." 

He was stronger than any of his mates, 

kept his head clearer because he did not 

fuddle it with beer, and availed himself of 

the liberty which then existed of working 

as fast and as much as he chose. On this 



FRANKLIN 7 

point he says : " My constant attendance 
(I never making a St. Monday) recom- 
mended me to the master ; and my 
uncommon quickness at composing occa- 
sioned my being put upon all work of 
dispatch, which was generally better paid. 
So I went on now very agreeably." 

On his return to Philadelphia Franklin 
obtained for a few months another occu- 
pation than that of printer ; but this 
employment failing through the death of 
his employer, FrankUn returned to print- 
ing, becoming the manager of a small 
printing office, in which he was the only 
skilled workman and was expected to 
teach several green hands. At that time 
he was only twenty-one years of age. 
This printing office often wanted sorts, 
and there was no type-foundry in America. 
Franklin succeeded in contriving a mould, 
struck the matrices in lead, and thus sup- 



8 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

plied the deficiencies of the office. The 
autobiography says : "I also engraved 
several things on occasion ; I made the 
ink ; I was warehouse man and every- 
thing, and in short quite a factotum." 
Nevertheless, he was dismissed before long 
by his incompetent employer, who, how- 
ever, was glad to re-engage him a few 
days later on obtaining a job to print 
some paper money for New Jersey. 
Thereupon Franklin contrived a copper- 
plate press for this job — the first that 
had been seen in the country — and cut 
the ornaments for the bills. Meantime 
Franklin, with one of the apprentices, 
had ordered a press and types from Lon- 
don, that they two might set up an inde- 
pendent office. Shortly after the New 
Jersey job was finished, these materials 
arrived in Philadelphia, and Franklin 
immediately opened his own printing 



FRANKLIN 9 

office. His partner " was, however, no 
compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom 
sober." The office prospered, and in July, 
1730, when Franklin was twenty-four 
years old, the partnership was dissolved, 
and Franklin was at the head of a well- 
established and profitable printing busi- 
ness. This business was the foundation 
of Franklin's fortune ; and better founda- 
tion no man could desire. His industry 
was extraordinary. Contrary to the cur- 
rent opinion. Dr. Baird of St. Andrews 
testified that the new printing office would 
succeed, " for the industry of that Frank- 
lin," he said, " is superior to anything I 
ever saw of the kind ; I see him still at 
work when I go home from the club, and 
he is at work again before the neighbors 
are out of bed." No trade rules or 
customs limited or levied toll on his 
productiveness. He speedily became by 



10 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

far the most successful printer in all the 
colonies, and in twenty years was able 
to retire from active business with a 
competency. 

One would, however, get a wrong im- 
pression of Franklin's career as a printer, 
if he failed to observe that from his boy- 
hood Franklin constantly used his connec- 
tion with a printing office to facilitate his 
remarkable work as an author, editor, 
and publisher. Even while he was an 
apprentice to his brother James he suc- 
ceeded in getting issued from his brother's 
press ballads and newspaper articles of 
which he was the anonymous author. 
When he had a press of his own he used 
it for publishing a newspaper, an almanac, 
and numerous essays composed or com- 
piled by himself His genius as a writer 
supported his skill and industry as a 
printer 



FRANKLIN 11 

The second part of the double subject 
assigned to me is Franklin as philosopher. 
The philosophy he taught and illustrated 
related to four perennial subjects of human 
interest — education, natural science, poli- 
tics, and morals. I propose to deal in that 
order with these four topics. 

Franklin s philosophy of education was 
elaborated as he gi^ew up, and was applied 
to himself throughout his life. In the 
first place, he had no regular education of 
the usual sort. He studied and read with 
an extraordinary diligence from his earli- 
est years ; but he studied only the subjects 
which attracted him, or which he himself 
believed would be good for him, and 
throughout life he pursued only those in- 
quiries for pursuing which he found within 
himself an adequate motive. The most 
important element in his training was 
reading, for which he had a precocious 



12 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

desire which was imperative, and proved 
to be lasting. His opportunities to get 
books were scanty ; but he seized on all 
such opportunities, and fortunately he 
early came upon the " Pilgrim's Progress,'* 
the Spectator, Plutarch, Xenophon's 
" Memorabilia," and Locke " On the Hu- 
man Understanding." Practice of English 
composition was the next agency in 
Frankhn's education ; and his method — 
quite of his own invention — was certainly 
an admirable one. He would make brief 
notes of the thoughts contained in a good 
piece of writing, and lay these notes aside 
for several days ; then, without looking at 
the book, he would endeavor to express 
these thoughts in his own words as fully 
as they had been expressed in the original 
paper. Lastly, he would compare his 
product with the original, thus discover- 
ing his shortcomings and errors. To im- 



FRANKLIN 13 

prove his vocabulary he turned specimens 
of prose into verse, and later, when he 
had forgotten the original, turned the 
verse back again into prose. This exer- 
cise enlarged his vocabulary and his 
acquaintance with synonyms and their 
different shades of meaning, and showed 
him how he could twist phrases and sen- 
tences about. His times for such exer- 
cises and for reading were at night after 
work, before work in the morning, and on 
Sundays. This severe training he imposed 
on himself ; and he was well advanced in 
it before he was sixteen years of age. 
His memory and his imagination must 
both have served him well ; for he not 
only acquired a style fit for narrative, 
exposition, or argument, but also learned 
to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, pro- 
verb, and dialogue. The third element 
in his education was writing for pubhca- 



14 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

tion ; he began very early, while he was 
still a young boy, to put all he had learned 
to use in writing for the press. When he 
was but nineteen years old he wrote and 
published in London " A Dissertation 
on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and 
Pain." In after years he was not proud 
of this pamphlet ; but it was, neverthe- 
less, a remarkable production for a youth 
of nineteen. So soon as he was able to 
establish a newspaper in Philadelphia he 
wrote for it with great spirit, and in a 
style at once accurate, concise, and attrac- 
tive, making immediate application of his 
reading and of the conversation of intelli- 
gent acquaintances on both sides of the 
ocean. His fourth principle of education 
was that it should continue through life, 
and should make use of the social in- 
stincts. To that end he thought that 
friends and acquaintances might fitly band 



FRANKLIN 15 

together in a systematic endeavor after 
mutual improvement. The Junto was 
created as a school of philosophy, morality, 
and politics ; and this purpose it actually 
served for many years. Some of the 
questions read at every meeting of the 
Junto, with a pause after each one, would 
be curiously opportune in such a society 
at the present day. For example. No. 5, 
" Have you lately heard how any present 
rich man, here or elsewhere, got his 
estate ? " And No. 6, " Do you know of 
a fellow- citizen . . . who has lately com- 
mitted an error proper for us to be warned 
against and avoid ? " When a new mem- 
ber was initiated he was asked, among 
other questions, the following : " Do you 
think any person ought to be harmed in 
his body, name, or goods, for mere specu- 
lative opinions or his external way of 
worship ? " and again, " Do you love truth 



16 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

for truth's sake, and will you endeavor 
impartially to find it, receive it yourself, 
and communicate it to others ? " The 
Junto helped to educate Franklin, and he 
helped greatly to train all its members. 

The nature of Franklin's own education 
accounts for many of his opinions on the 
general subject. Thus, he believed, con- 
trary to the judgment of his time, that 
Latin and Greek were not essential sub- 
jects in a liberal education, and that 
mathematics, in which he never excelled, 
did not deserve the place it held. He 
believed that any one who had acquired a 
command of good English could learn 
any other modern language that he really 
needed when he needed it ; and this faith 
he illustrated in his own person, for he 
learned French, when he needed it, suffi- 
ciently well to enable him to exercise 
great influence for many years at the 



FRANKLIN 17 

French court. As the fruit of his educa- 
tion he exhibited a clear, pungent, persua- 
sive EngHsh style, both in writing and 
in conversation — a style which gave him 
great and lasting influence among men. It 
is easy to say that such a training as Frank- 
lin's is suitable only for genius. Be that 
as it may, Franklin's philosophy of educa- 
tion certainly tells in favor of liberty for 
the individual in his choice of studies, and 
teaches that a desire for good reading and 
a capacity to write well are two very im- 
portant fruits of any liberal culture. It 
was all at the service of his successor 
Jefferson, the founder of the University 
of Virginia. 

Franklin's studies in natural philosophy 
are characterized by remarkable direct- 
ness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute 
candor in seeking the truth, and a power- 
ful scientific imagination. What has 



18 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

been usually considered his first discovery 
was the now familiar fact that northeast 
storms on the Atlantic coast begin to lee- 
ward. The Pennsylvania fireplace he 
invented was an ingenious application to 
the warming and ventilating of an apart- 
ment of the laws that regulate the move- 
ment of hot air. At the age of forty-one 
he became interested in the subject of 
electricity, and with the aid of many 
friends and acquaintances pursued the 
subject for four years, with no thought 
about personal credit for inventing either 
theories or processes, but simply with 
delight in experimentation and in efforts 
to explain the phenomena he observed. 
His kite experiment to prove lightning 
to be an electrical phenomenon very pos- 
sibly did not really draw lightning from 
the cloud ; but it supplied evidence of 
electrical energy in the atmosphere which 



FRANKLIN 19 

went far to prove that lightning was an 
electrical discharge. The sagacity of 
Franklin's scientific inquiries is well illus- 
trated by his notes on colds and their 
causes. He maintains that influenzas 
usually classed as colds do not arise, as a 
rule, from either cold or dampness. He 
points out that savages and sailors, who 
are often wet, do not catch cold, and that 
the disease called a cold is not taken by 
swimming. He maintains that people 
who live in the forest, in open barns, or 
with open windows, do not catch cold, 
and that the disease called a cold is gener- 
ally caused by impure air, lack of exercise, 
or overeating. He comes to the conclu- 
sion that influenzas and colds are conta- 
gious — a doctrine which, a century and a 
half later, was proved, through the advance 
of bacteriological science, to be sound. 
The following sentence exhibits remark- 



20 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

able insight, considering the state of 
medical art at that time : "I have long 
been satisfied from observation, that 
besides the general colds now termed 
influenzas (which may possibly spread 
by contagion, as well as by a particular 
quality of the air), people often catch cold 
from one another when shut up together 
in close rooms and coaches, and when 
sitting near and conversing so as to 
breathe in each other's transpiration ; 
the disorder being in a certain state." In 
the light of present knowledge what a 
cautious and exact statement is that ! 

There being no learned society in all 
America at the time, Franklin's scientific 
experiments were almost all recorded in 
letters written to interested friends ; and 
he was never in any haste to write these 
letters. He never took a patent on any 
of his inventions, and made no effort either 



FRANKLIN 21 

to get a profit from them, or to establish 
any sort of intellectual proprietorship in 
his experiments and speculations. One 
of his English correspondents, Mr. Col- 
linson, published in 1751 a number of 
Franklin's letters to him in a pamphlet 
called " New Experiments and Observa- 
tions in Electricity made at Philadelphia 
in America." This pamphlet was trans- 
lated into several European languages, and 
established over the continent — particu- 
larly in France — Franklin's reputation as 
a natural philosopher. A great variety 
of phenomena engaged his attention, such 
as phosphorescence in sea water, the cause 
of the saltness of the sea, the form and 
the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, the 
effect of oil in stilling waves, and the 
cause of smoky chimneys. Franklin also 
reflected and wrote on many topics which 
are now classified under the head of politi- 



22 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

cal economy, — such as paper currency, 
national wealth, free trade, the slave trade, 
the effects of luxury and idleness, and the 
misery and destruction caused by war. 
Not even his caustic wit could adequately 
convey in words his contempt and ab- 
horrence for war as a mode of settling 
questions arising between nations. He 
condensed his opinions on that subject 
into the epigram : " There never was a 
good war or a bad peace." 

Franklin's political philosophy may all 
be summed up in seven words — " first 
freedom, then public happiness and com- 
fort." The spirit of liberty was born in 
him. He resented his brother's blows 
when he was an apprentice, and escaped 
from them. As a mere boy he refused to 
attend church on Sundays in accordance 
with the custom of his family and his 
town, and devoted his Sundays to reading 



FRANKLIN 23 

and study. In practising his trade he 
claimed and diligently sought complete 
freedom. In public and private business 
alike he tried to induce people to take 
any action desired of them by presenting 
to them a motive they could understand 
and feel — a motive which acted on their 
own wills and excited their hopes. This 
is the only method possible under a 
regime of liberty. A perfect illustration 
of his practice in this respect is found in 
his successful provision of one hundred 
and fifty four-horse wagons for Braddock's 
force, when it was detained on its march 
from Annapolis to western Pennsylvania 
by the lack of wagons. The military 
method would have been to seize horses, 
wagons, and drivers wherever found. 
Franklin persuaded Braddock, instead of 
using force, to allow him (Franklki) to 
offer a good hire for horses, wagons, and 



24 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

drivers, and proper compensation for the 
equipment in case of loss. By this appeal 
to the frontier farmers of Pennsylvania he 
secured in two weeks all the transporta- 
tion required. To defend public order 
Franklin was perfectly ready to use pub- 
lic force, as, for instance, when he raised 
and commanded a regiment of militia to 
defend the northwestern frontier from the 
Indians after Braddock's defeat, and again, 
when it became necessary to defend Phil- 
adelphia from a large body of frontiers- 
men who had lynched a considerable 
number of friendly Indians, and were 
bent on revolutionizing the Quaker gov- 
ernment. But his abhorrence of all war 
was based on the facts, first, that during 
war the law must be silent, and, secondly, 
that military discipline, which is essential 
for effective fighting, annihilates individ- 
ual liberty. " Those," he said, " who 



FRANKLIN 25 

would give up essential liberty for the 
sake of a little temporary safety deserve 
neither liberty nor safety." The founda- 
tion of his firm resistance on behalf of the 
colonies to the English Parliament was 
his impregnable conviction that the love 
of liberty was the ruling passion of the 
people of the colonies. In 1766 he said 
of the American people : " Every act of 
oppression will sour their tempers, lessen 
greatly, if not annihilate, the profits of 
your commerce with them, and hasten 
their final revolt ; for the seeds of liberty 
are universally found there, and nothing 
can eradicate them." Because they loved 
liberty, they would not be taxed without 
representation ; they would not have 

soldiers quartered on them, or their gov- 
ernors made independent of the people in 
regard to their salaries ; or their ports 
closed, or their commerce regulated by 



26 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

Parliament. It is interesting to observe 
how Franklin's experiments and specula- 
tions in natural science often had a favor- 
able influence on freedom of thought. 
His studies in economics had a strong 
tendency in that direction. His views 
about religious toleration were founded 
on his intense faith in civil liberty ; and 
even his demonstration that lightning 
was an electrical phenomenon brought 
deliverance for mankind from an ancient 
terror. It remov^ed from the domain of 
the supernatural a manifestation of for- 
midable power that had been supposed to 
be a weapon of the arbitrary gods ; and 
since it increased man's power over nature, 
it increased his freedom. 

This faith in freedom was fully de- 
veloped in Franklin long before the 
American Revolution and the French 
Revolution made the fundamental princi- 



FRANKLIN 27 

pies of liberty familiar to civilized man- 
kind. His views concerning civil liberty 
were even more remarkable for his time 
than his views concerning religious lib- 
erty ; but they were not developed in a 
passionate nature inspired by an enthusi- 
astic idealism. He was the very embodi- 
ment of common sense, moderation, and 
sober honesty. His standard of human 
society is perfectly expressed in the 
description of New England which he 
wrote in 1772 : " I thought often of the 
happiness in New England, where every 
man is a freeholder, has a vote in public 
affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has 
plenty of good food and fuel, with whole 
clothes from head to foot, the manufac- 
ture perhaps of his own family. Long may 
they continue in this situation I " Such was 
Franklin's conception of a free and happy 
people. Such was his political philosophy. 



28 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

The moral philosophy of Franklin con- 
sisted almost exclusively in the inculcation 
of certain very practical and unimagina- 
tive virtues, such as temperance, frugality, 
industry, moderation, cleanliness, and 
tranquillity. Sincerity and justice, and 
resolution — that indispensable fly-wheel 
of virtuous habit — are found in his table 
of virtues ; but all his moral precepts seem 
to be based on observation and experience 
of life, and to express his convictions con- 
cerning what is profitable, prudent, and 
on the whole satisfactory in the life that 
now is. His philosophy is a guide of life, 
because it searches out virtues, and so 
provides the means of expelling vices. It 
may reasonably determine conduct. It did 
determine Franklin's conduct to a remark- 
able degree, and has had a prodigious 
influence for good on his countrymen and 
on civilized mankind. Nevertheless, it 



FRANKLIN 29 

omits all consideration of the prime motive 
power, which must impel to right conduct, 
as fire supplies the power which actuates 
the engine. That motive power is pure, 
unselfish love — love to God and love to 
man. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart . . . and thy 
neighbor as thyself." 

Franklin never seems to have perceived 
that the supreme tests of civilization are 
the tender and honorable treatment of 
women as equals, and the sanctity of 
home life. There was one primary virtue 
on his Hst which he did not always prac- 
tise. His failures in this respect dimin- 
ished his influence for good among his 
contemporaries, and must always qualify 
the admiration with which mankind will 
regard him as a moral philosopher and an 
exhorter to a good life. His sagacity, 
intellectual force, versatility, originahty. 



30 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

firmness, fortunate period of service, and 
longevity combined to make him a great 
leader of his people. In American public 
affairs the generation of w^ise leaders next 
to his own felt for him high admiration 
and respect ; and the strong republic, 
whose birth and youthful growth he wit- 
nessed, will carry down his fame as politi- 
cal philosopher, patriot, and apostle of 
liberty through long generations. 



WASHINGTON 



WASHINGTON 

The virtues of Washington were of 
two kinds, the splendid and the homely ; 
I adopt, for my part in this celebration, 
some consideration of Washington as a 
man of homely virtues, giving our far- 
removed generation a homely example. 

The first contrast to which I invite 
your attention is the contrast between the 
early age at which Washington began to 
profit by the discipline of real life and the 
late age at which our educated young 
men exchange study under masters, and 
seclusion in institutions of learning, for 
personal adventure and responsibility out 
in the world. Washington was a public 
surveyor at sixteen years of age. He 
could not spell well ; but he could make 



34 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

a correct survey, keep a good journal, and 
endure the hardships to which a surveyor 
in the Virginia wilderness was inevitably 
exposed. Our expectation of good ser- 
vice and hard work from boys of sixteen, 
not to speak of young men of twenty-six, 
is very low. I have heard it maintained 
in a learned college faculty that young 
men who were on the average nineteen 
years of age, were not fit to begin the 
study of economics or philosophy, even 
under the guidance of skilful teachers, and 
that no young man could nowadays begin 
the practice of a profession to advantage 
before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven 
years old. Now, Washington was at 
twenty-one the Governor of Virginia's 
messenger to the French forts beyond the 
AUeghanies. He was already an accom- 
plished woodman, an astute negotiator with 
savages and the French, and the cautious 



WASHINGTON 35 

yet daring leader of a company of raw, 
insubordinate frontiersmen, who were to 
advance 500 miles into a wilderness with 
nothing but an Indian trail to follow. 
In 1755, at twenty- three years of age, 
twenty years before the Revolutionary War 
broke out, he was a skilful and experienced 
fighter, and a colonel in the Virginia ser- 
vice. What a contrast to our college 
under-graduates of to-day, who at twenty- 
two years of age are still getting their 
bodily vigor through sports and not 
through real work, and who seldom seem 
to realize that, just as soon as they have 
acquired the use of the intellectual tools 
and stock with which a livelihood is to be 
earned in business or in the professions, 
the training of active life is immeasurably 
better than the training of the schools ! 
Yet Washington never showed at any 
age the least spark of genius ; he was only 



36 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

" sober, sensible, honest, and brave," as he 
said of Major-General Lincoln in 1791. 

By inheritance and by marriage Wash- 
ington became, while he was still young, 
one of the richest men in the country ; 
but what a contrast between his sort of 
riches and our sorts ! He was a planter 
and sportsman — a country gentleman. 
All his home days were spent in looking 
after his farms ; in breeding various kinds 
of domestic animals ; in fishing for profit ; 
in attending to the diseases and accidents 
which befall livestock, including slaves ; 
in erecting buildings, and repairing them ; 
in caring for or improving his mills, barns, 
farm implements, and tools. He always 
lived very close to nature, and from his 
boyhood studied the weather, the markets, 
his crops and woods, and the various qual- 
ities of his lands. He was an economical 
husbandman, attending to all the details 



WASHINGTON 37 

of the management of his large estates. 
He was constantly on horseback, often 
riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds. 
At sixty-seven years of age he caught 
the cold which killed him by getting wet 
on horseback, riding as usual about his 
farms. 

Compare this sort of life, physical and 
mental, with the life of the ordinary rich 
American of to-day, who has made his 
money in stocks and bonds, or as a banker, 
broker, or trader, or in the management 
of great transportation or industrial con- 
cerns. This modern rich man, in all 
probability, has nothing whatever to do 
with nature or with country life. He is 
soft and tender in body ; lives in the city ; 
takes no vigorous exercise, and has very 
little personal contact with the elemental 
forces of either nature or mankind. He 
is not like Washington an out-of-door 



38 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

man. Washington was a combination of 
land-owner, magistrate, and soldier, — the 
best combination for a leader of men 
which the feudal system produced. Our 
modern rich man is apt to possess no one 
of these functions, any one of which, well 
discharged, has in times past commanded 
the habitual respect of mankind. It is a 
grave misfortune for our country, and 
especially for our rich men, that the mod- 
ern forms of property, — namely, stocks 
and bonds, mortgages, and city buildings 
— do not carry with them any inevitable 
responsibilities to the state, or involve 
their owner in personal risks and charges 
as a leader or commander of the people. 
The most enviable rich man to-day is the 
intelligent industrial or commercial ad- 
venturer or promoter, in the good sense of 
those terms. He takes risks and assumes 
burdens on a large scale, and has a chance 



WASHINGTON 39 

to develop will, mind, and character, just 
as Queen Elizabeth's adventurers did all 
over the then known world. 

Again, Washington, as I have already 
indicated, was an economical person, care- 
ful about little expenditures as well as 
great, averse to borrowing money, and 
utterly impatient of waste. If a slave 
were hopelessly ill, he did not call a doc- 
tor, because it would be a useless expendi- 
ture. He insisted that the sewing woman, 
Carolina, who had only made five shirts 
in a week, not being sick, should make 
nine. He entered in his account ** thread 
and needle, one penny," and used said 
thread and needle himself. All this close- 
ness and contempt for shiftlessness and 
prodigality were perfectly consistent with 
a large and hospitable way of living ; for 
during many years of his life he kept open 
house at Mt. Vernon. This frugal and 



40 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

prudent man knew exactly what it meant 
to devote his " Ufe and fortune to the 
cause we are engaged in, if needful," as 
he wrote in 1774. This was not an ex- 
aggerated or emotional phrase. It was 
moderate, but it meant business. He 
risked his whole fortune. What he lost 
through his service in the Revolutionary 
War is clearly stated in a letter written 
from Mt. Vernon in 1784: ** I made no 
money from my estate during the nine 
years I was absent from it, and brought 
none home with me. Those who owed 
me, for the most part, took advantage of 
the depreciation, and paid me off with six- 
pence in the pound. Those to whom I 
was indebted, I have yet to pay, without 
other means, if they will wait, than selling 
part of my estate, or distressing those who 
were too honest to take advantage of the 
tender laws to quit scores with me." 



WASHINGTON 41 

Should we not all be glad if to-day a hun- 
dred or two multi-millionaires could give 
such an account as that of their losses in- 
curred in the public service, even if they 
had not, like Washington, risked their 
lives as well? In our times we have 
come to think that a rich man should not 
be frugal or economical, but rather waste- 
ful or extravagant. We have even been 
asked to believe that a cheap coat makes 
a cheap man. If there were a fixed rela- 
tion between a man's character and the 
price of his clothes, what improvement 
we should have seen in the national charac- 
ter since 1893 1 At Harvard University, 
twelve hundred students take three meals 
a day in the great dining-room of Memo- 
rial Hall, and manage the business them- 
selves through an elected President and 
Board of Directors. These officers pro- 
scribe stews, apparently because it is a form 



42 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

in which cheap meat may be offered them, 
neglecting the more important fact that 
the stew is the most nutritious and digest- 
ible form in which meats can be eaten. 
Mr. Edward Atkinson, the economist, 
invented an oven in which various kinds 
of foods may be cheaply and well pre- 
pared with a minimum of attention to the 
process. The workingmen, among whom 
he attempted to introduce it, took no 
interest in it whatever, because it was 
recommended to them as a cheap way of 
preparing inexpensive though excellent 
foods. This modern temper affords a 
most striking contrast to the practices 
and sentiments of Washington, senti- 
ments and practices which underlay his 
whole public life as well as his private 
life. 

If he were alive to-day, would he not 
be bewildered by much of our talk about 



WASHINGTON 43 

the rights of men and animals ? Wash- 
ington's mind dwelt very little on rights 
and very much on duties. For him, 
patriotism was a duty ; good citizenship 
was a duty ; and for the masses of man- 
kind it was a duty to clear away the 
forest, till the ground, and plant fruit 
trees, just as he prescribed to the hoped- 
for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha 
lands. For men and women in general 
he thought it a duty to increase and mul- 
tiply, and to make the wilderness glad 
with rustling crops, lowing herds, and 
children's voices. When he retired from 
the Presidency, he expressed the hope 
that he might " make and sell a little 
flour annually." For the first soldier and 
first statesman of his country, surely this 
was a modest anticipation of continued 
usefulness. We think more about our 
rights than our duties. He thought more 



44 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

about his duties than his rights. Pos- 
terity has given him first place because 
of the way in which he conceived and 
performed his duties ; it will judge the 
leaders of the present generation by the 
same standard, whatever their theories 
about human rights. 

Having said thus much about contrasts, 
let me now turn to some interesting re- 
semblances between Washington's times 
and our own. We may notice in the first 
place the permanency of the fighting 
quality in the English- American stock. 
Washington was all his life a fighter. 
The entire American people is to-day a 
fighting people, prone to resort to force 
and prompt to take arms, the different 
sections of the population differing chiefly 
in regard to the nature and amount of the 
provocation which will move them to vio- 
lence and combat. To this day nothing 



WASHINGTON 45 

moves the admiration of the people so 
quickly as composure, ingenuity, and suc- 
cess in fighting ; so that even in political 
contests all the terms and similes are 
drawn from war, and among American 
sports the most popular have in them a 
large element of combat. Washington 
was roused and stimulated by the dangers 
of the battlefield, and utterly despised 
cowards, or even men who ran away in 
battle from a momentary terror which 
they did not habitually manifest. His 
early experience taught him, however, 
that the Indian way of fighting in woods 
or on broken ground was the most effec- 
tive way ; and he did not hesitate to adopt 
and advocate that despised mode of fight- 
ing, which has now, one hundred and 
fifty years later, become the only possible 
mode. The Indian in battle took in- 
stantly to cover, if he could find it. In 



46 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

our Civil War both sides learned to throw 
up breastworks wherever they expected 
an engagement to take place ; and the 
English in South Africa have demonstrated 
that the only possible way to fight with 
the present long range quick-firing guns, 
is the way in which the "treacherous 
devils," as Washington called the Indians, 
fought General Braddock, that is, with 
stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade ; with 
hiding and crawling behind screens and 
obstacles ; with the least possible appear- 
ance in open view, with nothing that can 
glitter on either arms or clothes, and with 
no visible distinction between officers and 
men. War is now a genuinely Indian 
performance, just as Washington saw one 
hundred and fifty years ago that it ought 
to be. 

The silent Washington's antipathy to 
the press finds an exact parallel in our own 



WASHINGTON 47 

day. He called the writers of the press 
*' infamous scribblers." President Cleve- 
land called them " ghouls." But it must 
be confessed that the newspapers of 
Washington's time surpassed those of the 
present day in violence of language, and 
in lack of prophetic insight and just ap- 
preciation of men and events. When 
Washington retired from the Presidency 
the Aurora said, " If ever a Nation 
was debauched by a man, the Ameri- 
can Nation has been debauched by 
Washington." 

Some of the weaknesses or errors of the 
Congresses of Washington's time have 
been repeated in our own day, and seem 
as natural to us as they doubtless seemed 
to the men of 1776 and 1796. Thus, the 
Continental Congress incurred all the evils 
of a depreciated currency with the same 
blindness which afflicted the Congress of 



48 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

the Southern Confederacy and the Union 
Congress during the Civil War, or the 
Democrat-PopuHst party of still more 
recent times. The refusal of the Con- 
gress of 1777 to carry out the agreement 
made with the Hessian prisoners at Sara- 
toga reminds one of the refusal of Con- 
gress, in spite of the public exhortations 
of our present Executive, and his cabinet, 
to carry out the understanding with Cuba 
in regard to the commercial relations of 
the island with the United States. In 
both cases the honor of the country was 
tarnished. 

The intensity of party spirit in Wash- 
ington's time closely resembles that of our 
own day, but was certainly fiercer than it 
is now, the reason being that the ques- 
tions at issue were absolutely fundamental. 
When the question was whether the Con- 
stitution of the United States was a sure 



WASHINGTON 49 

defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare 
an unsuspecting people, intensity of feel- 
ing on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. 
During Washington's two administra- 
tions a considerable number of the most 
eminent American publicists feared that 
dangerous autocratic powers had been 
conferred on the President by the Con- 
stitution. Washington held that there 
was no ground for these fears, and acted 
as if the supposition was absurd. When 
the question was whether we should love 
and adhere to revolutionary France, or 
rather become partisans of Great Britain 
— the power from which we had just 
won independence — it is no wonder that 
political passions burnt fiercely. On this 
question Washington stood between the 
opposing parties, and often commended 
himself to neither. In spite of the tre- 
mendous partisan heat of the times, 



50 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

Washington, through both his adminis- 
trations, made appointments to pubUe 
office from both parties indifferently. 
He appointed some well-known Tories 
and many Democrats. He insisted only 
on fitness as regards character, ability, 
and experience, and preferred persons, of 
whatever party, who had already proved 
their capacity in business or the profes- 
sions, or in legislative or administrative 
offices. It is a striking fact that Wash- 
ington is the only one of the Presidents 
of the United States who has, as a rule, 
acted on these principles. His example 
was not followed by his early successors, 
or by any of the more recent occupants 
of the Presidency. His successors, elected 
by a party, have not seen their way to 
make appointments without regard to 
party connections. The Civil Service 
Reform agitation of the last twenty-five 



WASHINGTON 51 

years is nothing but an effort to re- 
turn, in regard to the humbler national 
offices, to the practice of President 
Washington. 

In spite of these resemblances between 
Washington's time and our own, the pro- 
found contrasts make the resemblances 
seem unimportant. In the first years 
of the Government of the United States 
there was widespread and genuine appre- 
hension lest the executive should develop 
too much power, and lest the centraliza- 
tion of the Government should become 
overwhelming. Nothing can be farther 
from our political thoughts to-day than 
this dread of the power of the national 
executive. On the contrary, we are con- 
stantly finding that it is feeble where we 
wish it were strong, impotent where we 
wish it omnipotent. The Senate of the 
United States has deprived the President 



52 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

of much of the power intended for his 
office, and has then found it, on the whole, 
convenient and desirable to allow itself to 
be held up by any one of its members who 
possesses the bodily strength and the as- 
surance to talk or read aloud by the week. 
Other forces have developed within the 
Republic quite outside of the Government, 
which seem to us to override and almost 
defy the closely limited governmental 
forces. Quite lately we have seen two 
of these new forces — one a combination 
of capitalists, the other a combination of 
laborers — put the President of the Uni- 
ted States into a position of a mediator be- 
tween two parties whom he could not con- 
trol, and with whom he must intercede. 
This is part of the tremendous nineteenth 
century democratic revolution, and of the 
newly acquired facilities for combination 
and association for the promotion of 



WASHINGTON 53 

common interests. We no longer dread 
abuse of the power of state or church ; 
we do dread abuse of the powers of 
compact bodies of men, highly organized 
and consenting to be despotically ruled, 
for the advancement of their selfish 
interests. 

Washington was a stern disciplinarian 
in war ; if he could not shoot deserters 
he wanted them " stoutly w^hipped." He 
thought that army officers should be of a 
different class from their men, and should 
never put themselves on an equality with 
their men ; he went himself to suppress 
the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and 
always believed that firm government was 
essential to freedom. He never could 
have imagined for a moment the tolera- 
tion of disorder and violence which is now 
exhibited everywhere in our country when 
a serious strike occurs. He was the chief 



54 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

actor through the long struggles, military 
and civil, which attended the birth of this 
nation, and took the gravest responsi- 
bilities which could then fall to the lot of 
soldiers or statesmen ; but he never en- 
countered, and indeed never imagined, 
the anxieties and dangers which now 
beset the Republic of which he was the 
founder. We face new difficulties. Shall 
we face them with Washington's courage, 
wisdom, and success ? 

Finally, I ask your attention to the 
striking contrast between the wealth of 
Washington and the poverty of Abraham 
Lincoln, the only one of the succeeding 
Presidents who won anything like the 
place in the popular heart that Wash- 
ington has always occupied. Washington, 
while still young, was one of the richest 
men in the country ; Lincoln, while young, 
was one of the poorest ; both rendered su- 



WASHINGTON 55 

preme service to their country and to 
freedom ; between these two extremes 
men of many degrees as regards property 
holding have occupied the Presidency, the 
majority of them being men of moderate 
means. The lesson to be drawn from 
these facts seems to be that the Republic 
can be greatly served by rich and poor 
alike, but has oftenest been served credit- 
ably by men who were neither rich nor 
poor. In the midst of the present con- 
flicts between employers and employed, 
between the classes that are already well 
to do and the classes who believe it to be 
the fault of the existing order that they 
too are not well to do, and in plain sight 
of the fact that democratic freedom per- 
mits the creation and perpetuation of 
greater differences as regards possessions 
than the world has ever known before, 
it is comforting to remember that true 



56 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

patriots and wise men are bred in all 
the social levels of a free commonwealth, 
and that the Republic may find in any 
condition of life safe leaders and just 
rulers. 



CHANNING 



CHANNING 

We commemorate to-day a great 
preacher. It is the fashion to say that 
preaching is a thing of the past, other 
influences having taken its place. But 
Boston knows better ; for she had two 
great preachers in the nineteenth century, 
and is sure that an immense and enduring 
force was theirs, and through them, hers. 
Channing and Brooks ! Men very unhke 
in body and mind, but preachers of hke 
tendency and influence from their com- 
mon love of freedom and faith in mankind. 
This city has learned by rich experi- 
ence that preaching becomes the most 
productive of all human works the mo- 
ment the adequate preacher appears — 



60 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

a noble man with a noble message. Such 
was Channing. 

His public work was preceded and ac- 
companied by a great personal achieve- 
ment. All his life he grew in spirit, 
becoming always freer, broader, and more 
sympathetic. In forty years he worked 
his way out of moderate Calvinism with- 
out the Trinity into such doctrines as 
these : — " The idea of God ... is the 
idea of our own spiritual natures purified 
and enlarged to infinity." " The sense 
of duty is the greatest gift of God. The 
idea of right is the primary and highest 
revelation of God to the human mind ; 
and all outward revelations are founded 
on and addressed to it." There is " but 
one object of cherished and enduring love 
in heaven or on earth, and that is moral 
goodness." " I do and I must reverence 
human nature. ... I honor it for its 



CHANNING 61 

struggles against oppression, for its 
growth and progress under the weight 
of so many chains and prejudices, for 
its achievements in science and art, and 
still more for its examples of heroic 
and saintly virtue. These are marks of a 
divine origin and pledges of a celestial 
inheritance." ** Perfection is man's proper 
and natural goal." What an immense 
distance between these doctrines of Chan- 
ning's maturity and the Calvinism of his 
youth ! He was a meditative, reflecting 
man, who read much, but took selected 
thoughts of others into the very substance 
and fibre of his being, and made them his 
own. The foundation of his professional 
power and public influence was this great 
personal achievement, this attuning of his 
own soul to noblest harmonies. 

Thousands of ministers and spiritually- 
minded laymen of many denominations 



62 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

have travelled since Channing's death the 
road he laid out, and so have been delivered 
from the inhuman doctrines of the fall of 
man, the wrath of God, vicarious atone- 
ment, everlasting hell for the majority, 
and the rescue of a predestined few. 
They should all join in giving heartfelt 
praise and thanks to Channing, who 
thought out clearly, and preached with fer- 
vid reiteration, the doctrines which have 
delivered them from a painful bondage. 

Another remarkable quality of Chan- 
ning's teachings is their universality. Men 
of learning and spirituality in all the 
civilized nations have welcomed his 
words, and found in them teachings ot 
enduring and expansive influence. Many 
Biblical scholars, in the technical sense, 
have arrived eighty years later at Chan- 
ning's conclusions about the essential 
features of Christianity, although Chan- 



CHANNING 63 

ning was no scholar in the modern sense ; 
while they go far beyond him in treating 
the Bible as a collection of purely human 
writings and in rejecting the so-called 
supernatural quality of the Jewish and 
Christian Scriptures. Indeed, many Bibli- 
cal scholars belonging to-day to evan- 
gelical sects have arrived not only at 
Channing's position, but also at Emer- 
son's. 

Just how much Channing's pubhshed 
works have had to do with this quiet 
but fateful revolution no man can tell. 
The most eminent to-day of American 
Presbyterian divines preached an excel- 
lent sermon in the Harvard College 
Chapel one Sunday evening not many 
years ago, and asked me, as we walked 
away together, how I liked it. I replied : 
" Very much ; it was all straight out ot 
Channing." " That is strange," he said, 



64 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

"for I have never read Channing." It 
is great testimony to the pervasive qual- 
ity of a prophet's teachings when they 
become within fifty years a component 
of the intellectual atmosphere of the 
new times. At a dinner of Harvard 
graduates I once complained that, al- 
though I heard in the College Chapel 
a great variety of preachers connected 
with many different denominations, the 
preaching was, after all, rather monoto- 
nous, because they all preached Chan- 
ning. Phillips Brooks spoke after me 
and said : " The President is right in 
thinking our present preaching monoto- 
nous, and the reason he gives for this 
monotony is correct ; we aU do preach 
Channing." 

The direct influence of Channing's 
writings has been vast, for they are read 
in English in all parts of the world, 



CHANNING 65 

and have been translated into many lan- 
guages. Thirty years ago I spent a long 
day in showing Don Pedro, the Emperor 
of Brazil, some of the interesting things 
in the laboratories and collections of Har- 
vard University. He was the most as- 
siduous visitor that I ever conducted 
through the University buildings, intelli- 
gently interested in a great variety of 
objects and ideas. Late in the afternoon 
he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness : 
" Now I will visit the tomb of Channing." 
We drove to Mount Auburn, and found 
the monument erected by the Federal 
Street Church. The Emperor copied 
with his own hand George Ticknor's in- 
scriptions on the stone, and made me 
verify his copies. Then, with his great 
weight and height, he leaped into the air, 
and snatched a leaf from the maple which 
overhung the tomb. " 1 am going to put 

5 



66 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

that leaf," he said, " into my best edition 
of Channing. I have read all his pub- 
lished works, — some of them many times 
over. He was a very great man." The 
Emperor of Brazil was a Roman Catholic. 
Channing's philanthropy was a legiti- 
mate outcome of his view of religion. 
For him practical religion was character- 
building by the individual human being. 
But character-building in any large group 
or mass of human beings means social re- 
form ; therefore Channing was a preacher 
and active promoter of social regeneration 
in this world. He depicted the hideous 
evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, 
and war. He advocated and supported 
every well-directed effort to improve pub- 
lic education, the administration of charity, 
and the treatment of criminals, and to lift 
up the laboring classes. He denounced 
the bitter sectarian and partisan spirit of 



CHANNING 67 

his day. He refused entire sympathy to 
the abohtionists, because of the ferocity 
and violence of their habitual language 
and the injustice of their indiscriminate 
attacks. He distrusted money worship, 
wealth, and luxury. 

^ These sentiments and actions grew 
straight out of his religious conceptions, 
and were their legitimate fruit. All his 
social aspirations and hopes were rooted 
in his fundamental conception of the 
fatherhood of God, and its corollary the 
brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea 
of the infinite worth of human nature and 
of the inherent greatness of the human 
soul, in contrast with the then prevailing 
doctrines of human vileness and impo- 
tency, which made him resent with such 
indignation the wrongs of slavery, intem- 
perance, and war, and urge with such 
ardor every effort to deliver men from 



68 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

poverty and ignorance, and to make 
them gentler and juster to one another. 

In no subject which he discussed does 
the close connection between Channing's 
theology and his philanthropy appear more 
distinctly than in education. He says in 
his remarks on education : . . . " There is 
nothing on earth so precious as the mind, 
soul, character of the child. . . . There 
should be no economy in education. Mon- 
ey should never be weighed against the 
soul of a child. It should be poured out 
like water for the child's intellectual and 
moral life." It is more than two genera- 
tions since those sentences were written, 
and still the average public expenditure 
on the education of a child in the United 
States is less than fifteen dollars a year. 
Eastern Massachusetts is the commu- 
nity in the whole world which gives most 
thought, time, and money to education, 



CHANNING 69 

public and endowed. Whence came this 
social wisdom ? From Protestantism, from 
Congregationalism, from the religious 
teachings of Channing and his disciples. 
Listen to this sentence: "Benevolence is 
short-sighted indeed, and must blame itself 
for failure, if it do not see in education 
the chief interest of the human race." 

It is impossible to join in this centen- 
nial celebration of the advent to Boston 
of this religious pioneer and philanthropic 
leader without perceiving that in certain 
respects the country has recently fallen 
away from the moral standards he set up. 
Channing taught that no real good can 
come through violence, injustice, greed, 
and the inculcation of hatred and enmities, 
or of suspicions and contempts. He be- 
lieved that public well-being can be pro- 
moted only through public justice, freedom, 
peace, and good will among men. 



70 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

He never could have imagined that 
there would be an outburst in his dear 
country, grown rich and strong, of such 
doctrines as that the might of arms, 
possessions, or majorities makes right ; 
that a superior civilization may rightly 
force itself on an inferior by wholesale 
killing, hurting, and impoverishing ; that 
an extension of commerce, or of mission- 
ary activities, justifies war ; that the ex- 
ample of imperial Rome is an instructive 
one for republican America ; and that the 
right to liberty and the brotherhood of 
man are obsolete sentimentalities. 

Nevertheless, in spite of these tempo- 
rary aberrations of the public mind and 
heart, it is plain that many of Channing s 
anticipations and hopes have already been 
realized, that his influence on three gen- 
erations of men has been profound and 
wholly beneficent, and that the world is 



CHANNING 71 

going his way, though with slow and 
halting steps. 

His life brightened to its close. In 
its last summer but one he wrote : " This 
morning I plucked a globe of the dande- 
lion — the seed-vessel — and was struck 
as never before with the silent, gentle 
manner in which nature sows her seed. 
... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed 
broadcast. ... So we must send truth 
abroad, not forcing it on here and there 
a mind, and watching its progress anx- 
iously, but trusting that it will light on a 
kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature 
teaches." 

May those who stand here one hun- 
dred years hence say, — the twentieth 
century supplied more of kindly soil for 
Channing seed than the nineteenth. 



EMERSON 



EMERSON 

Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, 
and not a rhetorician, in the common 
sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly 
in prose, but also in verse. His verse was 
usually rough, but sometimes finished and 
melodious ; it was always extraordinarily 
concise and expressive. During his en- 
gagement to the lady who became his 
second wife, he ^Tote thus to her : " I am 
born a poet, — of a low class without 
doubt, yet a poet ; that is my nature and 
vocation. My singing, be sure, is very 
husky, and is, for the most part, in prose. 
Still, I am a poet in the sense of a per- 
ceiver and dear lover of the harmonies 
that are in the soul and in matter, and 



76 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

specially of the correspondences between 
these and those." 

This husky poet had his living to get. 
His occupations in life were those of the 
teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. 
He was a teacher at various times be- 
tween 1818 and 1826 ; but he never 
liked teaching. He was a preacher at 
intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled 
minister only from 1829 to 1832. His 
career as a lecturer began in the autumn 
of 1833 ; and his first book, ** Nature," was 
published in 1836, when he was thirty- 
three years old. His lectures for money 
were given as a rule during the winter 
and early spring ; and for thirty years the 
travelling he was obliged to do in search 
of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, 
and not wdthout serious hardships and ex- 
posures. These occupations usually gave 
him an income sufficient for his simple 



EMERSON 77 

wants ; but there were times when outgo 
exceeded income. The little property 
his first wife left him ($1200 a year) re- 
lieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety 
by 1834 ; although it did not relieve him 
from earning by his own labor the liveli- 
hood of his family. 

In 1834 he went to live in Concord, 
where his grandfather had been the min- 
ister at the time of the Revolution, and 
in 1835 he bought the house and grounds 
there which were his home for the rest 
of his days. Before settling in Concord, 
he had spent one winter and spring 
(1826-27) in the Southern states, and 
seven months of 1833 in Europe. Both 
of these absences were necessitated by 
the state of his health, which was 
precarious during his young manhood. 
With these exceptions, he had lived in 
Boston or its immediate neighborhood, 



78 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

until he settled in Concord. His pro- 
genitors on both sides were chiefly New 
England ministers. His formal educa- 
tion was received in the Boston Latin 
School and Harvard College, and was 
therefore purely local. How narrow and 
provincial seems his experience of life I 
A little city, an isolated society, a country 
village I Yet through books, and through 
intercourse with intelligent persons, he 
was really " set in a large place." The 
proof of this largeness, and of the keen- 
ness of his mental and moral vision, is 
that, in regard to some of the chief con- 
cerns of mankind, he was a seer and a 
fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I 
hope to demonstrate to-night in three 
great fields of thought, — education, social 
organization, and religion. 

Although a prophet and inspirer of re- 
form, Emerson was not a reformer. He 



EMERSON 79 

was but a halting supporter of the reforms 
of his day ; and the eager experimenters 
and combatants in actual reforms found 
him a disappointing sort of sympathizer. 
His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines 
often radical, and his exhortations fervid ; 
but when it came to action, particularly 
to habitual action, he was surprisingly 
conservative. With an exquisite candor, 
and a gentle resolution of rarest quality 
he broke his strong ties to the Second 
Church of Boston before he was thirty 
years old, abandoning the profession for 
which he had been trained, and which, 
in many of its aspects, he honored and 
enjoyed ; yet he attended church on Sun- 
days all his life with uncommon regu- 
larity. He refused to conduct public 
prayer, and had many things to say 
against it; but when he was an Over- 
seer of Harvard College, he twice voted 



80 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

to maintain the traditional policy of com- 
pelling all the students to attend morning 
prayers, in spite of the fact that a large 
majority of the Faculty urgently advo- 
cated abandoning that policy. He mani- 
fested a good deal of theoretical sympathy 
with the community experiments at Brook 
Farm and Fruitlands ; but he declined to 
take part in them himself. He was inti- 
mate with many of the leading aboli- 
tionists; but no one has described more 
vividly their grave intellectual and social 
defects. He laid down principles which, 
when applied, would inevitably lead to 
progress and reform ; but he took little 
part in the imperfect step-by-step process 
of actual reforming. He probably would 
have been an ineffective worker in any 
field of reform ; and, at any rate, strenu- 
ous labor on applications of his philosophy 
would have prevented him from main- 



EMERSON 81 

taining the flow of his philosophic and 
prophetic visions. The work of giving 
practical effect to his thought was left for 
other men to do, — indeed for generations 
of other serviceable men, who, filled with 
his ideals, will slowly work them out into 
institutions, customs, and other practical 
values. 

When we think of Emerson as a 
prophet, we at once become interested in 
the dates at which he uttered certain 
doctrines, or wrote certain pregnant sen- 
tences; but just here the inquirer meets 
a serious difficulty. He can sometimes 
ascertain that a given doctrine or sen_ 
tence was published at a given date ; but 
he may be quite unable to ascertain how 
much earlier the doctrine was really for- 
mulated, or the sentence written. Emer- 
son has been dead twenty-one years, and 
it is thirty years since he wrote anything 



82 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

new ; but his whole philosophy of life was 
developed by the time he was forty years 
old, and it may be doubted if he wrote 
anything after 1843, the germinal expres- 
sion of which may not be found in his 
journals, sermons, or lectures written be- 
fore that date. If, therefore, we find in 
the accepted thought, or established insti- 
tutions, of to-day recent developments of 
principles and maxims laid down by 
Emerson, we may fairly say that his 
thought outran his times certainly by 
one, and probably by two generations of 
men. 

I take up now the prophetic teachings 
of Emerson with regard to education. In 
the first place, he saw, with a clearness to 
which very few people have yet attained, 
the fundamental necessity of the school as 
the best civilizing agency, next to steady 



EMERSON 83 

labor, and the only sure means of perma- 
nent and progressive reform. He says 
outright : " We shall one day learn to 
supersede politics by education. What 
we call our root-and-branch reforms, of 
slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is 
only medicating the symptoms. We must 
begin higher up — namely, in education." 
He taught that if we hope to reform 
mankind, we must begin not with adults, 
but with children : we must begin in the 
school. There are some signs that this 
doctrine has now at last entered the minds 
of the so-called practical men. The 
Cubans are to be raised in the scale of 
civilization and public happiness ; so both 
they and we think they must have more 
and better schools. The Filipinos, too, 
are to be developed after the American 
fashion ; so we send them a thousand 
teachers of English. The Southern states 



84 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

are to be rescued from the persistent 
poison of slavery ; and, after forty years 
of failure with pohtical methods, we at 
last accept Emerson's doctrine, and say : 
We must begin earlier, — at school. The 
city slums are to be redeemed ; and the 
scientific charity workers find the best 
way is to get the children into kinder- 
gartens and manual training schools. 

Since the Civil War, a whole genera- 
tion of educational administrators has been 
steadily at work developing what is called 
the elective system in the institutions of 
education which deal with the ages above 
twelve. It has been a slow, step-by-step 
process, carried on against much active 
opposition and more sluggish obstruction. 
The system is a method of educational 
organization which recognizes the immense 
expansion of knowledge during the nine- 
teenth century, and takes account of the 



EMERSON 85 

needs and capacities of the individual child 
and youth. Now, Emerson laid down in 
plain terms the fundamental doctrines on 
which this elective system rests. He 
taught that the one prudence in life is 
concentration ; the one evil, dissipation. 
He said : ** You must elect your work : 
you shall take what your brain can, and 
drop all the rest." To this exhortation 
he added the educational reason for it, — 
only by concentration can the youth 
arrive at the stage of doing something 
with his knowledge, or get beyond the 
stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capa- 
city for producing. As Emerson puts it, 
" Only so can that amount of vital force 
accumulate which can make the step from 
knowing to doing." The educational in- 
stitutions of to-day have not yet fully 
appreciated this all-important step from 
knowing to doing. They are only begin- 



86 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

ning to perceive that, all along the course 
of education, the child and the youth 
should be doing something as well as 
learning something ; should be stimulated 
and trained by achievement ; should be 
constantly encouraged to take the step 
beyond seeing and memorizing to doing, 
— the step, as Emerson says, "out of a 
chalk circle of imbecihty into fruitfulness." 
Emerson carried this doctrine right on 
into mature life. He taught that nature 
arms each man with some faculty, large 
or small, which enables him to do easily 
some feat impossible to any other, and 
thus makes him necessary to society ; and 
that this faculty should determine the 
man's career. The advocates of the elec- 
tive system have insisted that its results 
were advantageous for society as a whole, 
as well as for the individual. Emerson 
put this argument in a nutshell at least 



EMERSON 87 

fifty years ago : " Society can never pros- 
per, but must always be bankrupt, until 
every man does that which he was created 
to do." 

Education used to be given almost ex- 
clusively through books. In recent years 
there has come in another sort of educa- 
tion through tools, machines, gardens, 
drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual 
training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening 
have come into use for the school ages ; 
the teaching of trades has been admitted 
to some public school systems ; and, in 
general, the use of the hands and eyes in 
productive labor has been recognized as 
having good educational effects. The 
education of men by manual labor was a 
favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had 
fully developed it as early as 1837, and he 
frequently recurred to it afterwards. In 
December of that year, in a course of 



88 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

lectures on Human Culture, he devoted 
one lecture to The Hands. He saw 
clearly that manual labor might be made 
to develop not only good mental qualities, 
but good moral qualities. To-day, it is 
frequently necessary for practical teachers, 
who are urging measures of improve- 
ment, to point this out, and to say, just 
as Emerson said two generations ago, 
that any falseness in mechanical work 
immediately appears ; that a teacher can 
judge of the moral quality of each boy in 
the class before him better and sooner 
from manual work than from book-work. 
Emerson taught that manual labor is the 
study of the external world ; that the use 
of manual labor never grows obsolete, and 
is inapplicable to no person. He said ex- 
plicitly that " a man should have a farm 
or a mechanical craft for his culture " ; that 
there is not only health, but education in 



EMERSON 89 

garden work ; that when a man gets sugar, 
hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, 
and letter paper by simply signing his 
name to a cheque, it is the producers and 
carriers of these articles that have got the 
education they yield, he only the com- 
modity ; and that labor is God's education. 
This was Emerson's doctrine more than 
sixty years ago. It is only ten years since 
the Mechanic Arts High School was 
opened in Boston. 

We are all of us aware that within the 
last twenty years there has been a detei™- 
mined movement of the American people 
toward the cultivation of art, and toward 
the public provision of objects which open 
the sense of beauty and increase public en- 
joyment. It is curious to see how literally 
Emerson prophesied the actual direction 
of these efforts : — 



90 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

" On the city's paved street 
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet ; 
Let spouting fountains cool the air. 
Singing in the sun-baked square ; 
Let statue, picture, park, and hall. 
Ballad, flag, and festival 
The past restore, the day adorn. 
And make to-morrow a new morn ! " 

We have introduced into our schools, 
of late years, lessons in drawing, model- 
ling, and designing, — not sufficiently, but 
in a promising and hopeful way. Emer- 
son taught that it is the office of art to 
educate the perception of beauty ; and he 
precisely describes one of the most recent 
of the new tendencies in American educa- 
tion and social life, when he says : " Beauty 
must come back to the useful arts, and 
the distinction between the fine and the 
useful arts be forgotten." That sentence 
is the inspiration of one of the most recent 
of the effi)rts to improve the arts and 



EMERSON 91 

crafts, and to restore to society the artistic 
craftsman. But how slow is the institu- 
tional realization of this ideal of art edu- 
cation I We are still struggling in our 
elementary and secondary schools to get 
a reasonable amount of instruction in 
drawing and music, and to transfer from 
other subjects a fair allotment of time to 
these invaluable elements of true culture, 
which speak a universal language. Yet 
the ultimate object of art in education is 
to teach men to see nature to be beautiful 
and at the same time useful, beautiful 
because alive and reproductive, useful 
while symmetrical and fair. Take up to- 
day the last essays on education, the last 
book on landscape architecture, or the 
freshest teachings of the principles of de- 
sign, and you will find them penetrated 
with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher 
of mankind. Emerson insists again and 



<' 



92 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

again that true culture must open the 
sense of beauty ; that " a man is a beggar 
who only lives to the useful." It will 
probably require several generations yet 
to induce the American people to accept 
his doctrine that all moments and objects 
can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, 
serenity, and repose in energy are the " end 
of culture and success enough." 

It has been clearly perceived of late 
that a leading object in education is the 
cultivation of fine manners. On tliis 
point the teachings of Emerson are fun- 
damental ; but the American institutions 
of education are only beginning to appre- 
ciate their significance. He teaches that 
genius or love invents fine manners, 
" which the baron and the baroness copy 
very fast, and by the advantage of a 
palace better the instruction. They 
stereotype the lesson they have learned 



EMERSON 93 

into a mode." There is much in that 
phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." 
For generations, American institutions of 
education were content with the humblest 
sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts 
and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds 
about the buildings. They are only lately 
beginning to acquire fine buildings with 
pleasing surroundings ; that is, they are 
just beginning to carry into practice 
Emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. 
The American cities are beginning to 
build handsome houses for their High 
Schools. Columbia University builds a 
noble temple for its Hbrary. The gradu- 
ates and friends of Harvard like to pro- 
vide her with a handsome fence round the 
Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within 
the fence, with a handsome stadium in- 
stead of shabby, wooden seats round the 
football gridiron, and to take steps for 



94 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

securing in the future broad connections 
between the grounds of the University 
and the Cambridge parks by the river. 
They are just now carrying into practice 
Emerson's teaching ; by the advantage of 
a palace they mean to better Harvard's 
instruction in manners. They are ac- 
cepting his doctrine that " manners make 
the fortune of the ambitious youth ; that 
for the most part his manners marry him, 
and, for the most part, he marries man- 
ners. When we think what keys they 
are, and to what secrets ; what high les- 
sons, and inspiring tokens of character 
they convey, and what divination is re- 
quired in us for the reading of this fine 
telegraph, — we see what range the sub- 
ject has, and what relations to convenience, 
power, and beauty." 

In Emerson's early days there was 
nothing in our schools and colleges which 



EMERSON 95 

at all corresponded to what we now know 
too much about under the name of athle- 
tic sports. The elaborate organization of 
these sports is a development of the last 
thirty years in our schools and colleges ; 
but I find in Emerson the true reason for 
the athletic cult, given a generation before 
it existed among us. Your boy "hates 
the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, 
fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the 
boy is right, and you are not fit to direct 
his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out 
his gymnastic training. . . . Football, 
cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climb- 
ing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art 
of power, which it is his main business to 
learn. . . . Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, 
boat, and horse constitute, among all who 
use them, secret free-masonries." We 
shall never find a completer justification 
of athletic sports than that. 



96 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

In his memorable address on The 
American Scholar, which was given at 
Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out 
that the function of the scholar should in- 
clude creative action, or, as we call it in 
these days, research, or the search for new 
truth. He says : " The soul active . . . 
utters truth, or creates. ... In its essence 
it is progressive. The book, the college, 
the school of art, the institution of any 
kind, stop with some past utterance of 
genius. . . . They look backward and not 
forward. But genius looks forward. Man 
hopes : genius creates. Whatever talents 
may be, if the man create not, the pure 
efflux of the Deity is not his ; — cinders 
and smoke there may be, but not yet 
flame." And more explicitly still, he 
says : " CoUeges have their indispensable 
office, — to teach elements. But they 
can only highly serve us when they aim 



EMERSON 97 

not to drill, but to create." When Emer- 
son wrote this passage, the spirit of re- 
search, or discovery, or creation had not 
yet breathed life into the higher institu- 
tions of learning in our country ; and 
to-day they have much to do and to 
acquire before they will conform to 
Emerson's ideal. 

There are innumerable details in which 
Emerson anticipated the educational ex- 
periences of later generations. I can cite 
but two of them. He taught that each 
age must write its own books ; " or rather, 
each generation for the next succeeding. 
The books of an older period will not fit 
this." How true that is in our own day 
when eighty thousand new books come 
fi'om the press of the civilized world in a 
single year ! Witness the incessant re- 
making or re-casting of the books of the 
preceding generation ! Emerson himself 



98 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

has gone into thousands of books in which 
his name is never mentioned. Even his- 
tory has to be re-written every few years, 
the long-surviving histories being rather 
monuments of style and method than ac- 
cepted treasuries of facts. Again, con- 
trary to the prevailing impression that the 
press has, in large measure, stripped elo- 
quence of its former influence, Emerson 
taught that " if there ever was a country 
where eloquence was a power, it is the 
United States." He included under elo- 
quence the useful speech, all sorts of 
political persuasion in the great arena of 
the Republic, and the lessons of science, 
art, and religion which should be " brought 
home to the instant practice of thirty 
millions of people," now become eighty. 
The colleges and universities have now 
answered in the affirmative Emerson's 
question, " Is it not worth the ambition 



EMERSON 99 

of every generous youth to train and arm 
his mind with all the resources of knowl- 
edge, of method, of grace, and of character 
to serve such a constituency ? " But then 
Emerson's definition of eloquence is sim- 
ple, and foretells the practice of to-day 
rather than describes the practice of 
Webster, Everett, Choate, and Winthrop, 
his contemporaries : " Know your fact ; 
hug your fact. For the essential thing is 
heat, and heat comes of sincerity. . . . 
Eloquence is the power to translate a 
truth into language perfectly intelligible 
to the person to whom you speak." 

I turn next to some examples of Emer- 
son's anticipation of social conditions, 
visible to him as seer in his own day, and 
since become plain to the sight of the 
ordinary millions. When he accumulated 
in his journals the original materials of his 

I. Of a 



100 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

essay on Worship, there were no large 
cities in the United States in the present 
sense of that term. The great experiment 
of democracy was not far advanced, and 
had not developed many of its sins and 
dangers ; yet how justly he presented 
them in the following description : " In 
our large cities, the population is godless, 
materialized, — no bond, no fellow-feeling, 
no enthusiasm. These are not men, but 
hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites 
walking. How is it people manage to 
live on, so aimless as they are ? . . . There 
is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in 
wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, 
galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing- 
machines, and in public opinion, but not 
in divine causes." 

In Emerson's day, luxury in the pres- 
ent sense had hardly been developed in 
our country ; but he foresaw its coming, 



EMERSON 101 

and its insidious destructiveness. " We 
spend our incomes for paint and paper, 
for a hundred trifles, I know not what, 
and not for the things of a man. Our 
expense is almost all for conformity. It 
is for cake that we run in debt ; it is not 
the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, 
not worship, that costs us so much. Why 
needs any man be rich ? Why must he 
have horses, fine garments, handsome 
apartments, access to public houses and 
places of amusement ? Only for want of 
thought. . . . We are first thoughtless, 
and then find that we are moneyless. 
We are first sensual and then must be 
rich." He foresaw the young man's state 
of mind to-day about marriage — I must 
have money before I can marry ; and 
deals with it thus : " Give us wealth and 
the home shall exist. But that is a very 
imperfect and inglorious solution of the 



102 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

problem, and therefore no solution. Give 
us wealth I You ask too much. Few have 
wealth ; but all must have a home. IVIen 
are not born rich ; in getting wealth the 
man is generally sacrificed, and often is 
sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last." 
We have come to understand by ex- 
perience that the opinion of masses of 
men is a formidable power which can be 
made safe and useful. In earlier days 
this massed opinion was either despised or 
dreaded ; and it is dreadful, if either con- 
fined or misdirected. Emerson compares 
it to steam. Studied, economized, and 
directed, steam has become the power by 
which all great labors are done. Like 
steam is the opinion of political masses I 
If crushed by castles, armies, and police, 
dangerously explosive ; but if furnished 
with schools and the ballot, developing 
" the most harmless and energetic form 



EMERSON 103 

of a state." His eyes were wide open to 
some of the evil intellectual effects of 
democracy. The individual is too apt to 
wear the time-worn yoke of the multi- 
tude's opinions. No multiplying of con- 
temptible units can produce an admirable 
mass. " If I see nothing to admire in a 
unit, shall I admire a million units ? " 
The habit of submitting to majority rule 
cultivates individual subserviency. He 
pointed out two generations ago that the 
action of violent political parties in a 
democracy might provide for the individ- 
ual citizen a systematic training in moral 
cowardice. 

It is interesting, at the stage of indus- 
trial warfare which the world has now 
reached, to observe how Emerson, sixty 
years ago, discerned clearly the absurdity 
of paying all sorts of service at one rate, 
now a favorite notion with some labor 



104 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

unions. He points out that even when 
all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, 
differences in possessions will instantly 
arise : ** In one hand the dime became an 
eagle as it fell, and in another hand a cop- 
per cent. For the whole value of the 
dime is in knowing what to do with it." 
Emerson was never deceived by a specious 
philanthropy, or by claims of equality 
which find no support in the nature of 
things. He was a true democrat, but 
still could say : " I think I see place and 
duties for a nobleman in every society ; 
but it is not to drink wine and ride in a 
fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for 
the multitude by forethought, by elegant 
studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, 
and the remembrance of the humble old 
friend, — by making his life secretly beau- 
tiful." How fine a picture of the demo- 
cratic nobility is that I 



EMERSON 105 

In his lecture on Man the Reformer, 
which was read before the Mechanics' 
Apprentices' Association in Boston in 
January, 1841, Emerson described in the 
clearest manner the approaching strife 
between laborers and employers, between 
poor and rich, and pointed out the cause 
of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, 
and mutual distrust which ran through 
the community. He also described, with 
perfect precision, the only ultimate remedy, 
— namely, the sentiment of love. " Love 
would put a new face on this weary old 
world in which we dwell as pagans and 
enemies too long. . . . The virtue of this 
principle in human society in application 
to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. 
But one day all men will be lovers ; and 
every calamity will be dissolved in the 
universal sunshine." It is more than sixty 
years since those words were uttered, and 



106 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

in those years society has had large ex- 
perience of industrial and social strife, of 
its causes and consequences, and of many 
attempts to remedy or soften it ; but all 
this experience only goes to show that 
there is but one remedy for these ills. It 
is to be found in kindness, good fellow- 
ship, and the affections. In Emerson's 
words, " We must be lovers, and at once 
the impossible becomes possible." The 
world will wait long for this remedy, but 
there is no other. 

Like every real seer and prophet whose 
testimony is recorded, Emerson had in- 
tense sympathy with the poor, laborious, 
dumb masses of mankind, and being a 
wide reader in history and biography, 
he early arrived at the conviction that 
history needed to be written in a new 
manner. It was long before Green's 
History of the English People that Em- 



EMERSON 107 

erson wrote : " Hence it happens that the 
whole interest of history Hes in the for- 
tunes of the poor." In recent years this 
view of history has come to prevail, and 
we are given the stories of institutions, 
industries, commerce, crafts, arts, and 
beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties 
and wars. For Emerson it is always 
feats of liberty and wit which make 
epochs of history. Commerce is civil- 
izing because "the power which the sea 
requires in the sailor makes a man of him 
very fast." The invention of a house, 
safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, 
gives play to the finer faculties, and in- 
troduces art, manners, and social de- 
lights. The discovery of the post office 
is a fine metre of civilization. The sea- 
going steamer marks an epoch ; the sub- 
jection of electricity to take messages and 
turn wheels marks another. But, after 



108 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

all, the vital stages of human progress 
are marked by steps toward personal, in- 
dividual freedom. The love of liberty 
was Emerson's fundamental passion : — 

" For He that ruleth high and wise, 
Nor pauseth in His plan, 
Will take the sun out of the skies 
Ere freedom out of man." 

The new National League of Indepen- 
dent Workmen of America has very 
appropriately taken its motto from 
Emerson : — 

" For what avail the plough or sail 
Or land or life, if freedom fail ? " 

The sympathetic reader of Emerson 
comes often upon passages written long 
ago which are positively startling in their 
anticipation of sentiments common to- 
day and apparently awakened by very 
recent events. One would suppose that 
the following passage was written yes- 



EMERSON 109 

terday. It was written fifty-six years 
ago. "And so, gentlemen, I feel in re- 
gard to this aged England, with the pos- 
sessions, honors, and trophies, and also 
with the infirmities of a thousand years 
gathering around her, irretrievably com- 
mitted as she now is to many old cus- 
toms which cannot be suddenly changed ; 
pressed upon by the transitions of trade, 
and new and all incalculable modes, fab- 
rics, arts, machines, and competing pop- 
ulations, — I see her not dispirited, not 
weak, but well remembering that she has 
seen dark days before; — indeed with a 
kind of instinct that she sees a little bet- 
ter in a cloudy day, and that in storm of 
battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor 
and a pulse like a cannon." 

Before the Civil War the Jew had no 
such place in society as he holds to-day. 
He was by no means so familiar to Amer- 



110 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

icans as he is now. Emerson speaks 
twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in 
terms precisely similar to those we com- 
monly hear to-day : ** We see how much 
will has been expended to extinguish the 
Jew, in vain. . . . The sufferance which 
is the badge of the Jew has made him 
in these days the ruler of the rulers 
of the earth." Those keen observations 
were made certainly more than forty 
years ago, and probably more than fifty. 

Landscape architecture is not yet an 
established profession among us, in spite 
of the achievements of Downing, Cleve- 
land, and Olmsted and their disciples ; 
yet much has been accomplished within 
the last twenty-five years to realize the 
predictions on this subject made by Em- 
erson in his lecture on The Young Amer- 
ican. He pointed out in that lecture that 
the beautiful gardens of Europe are un- 



EMERSON 111 

known among us, but might be easily- 
imitated here, and said that the land- 
scape art "is the Fine Art which is left 
for us. . . . The whole force of all arts 
goes to facilitate the decoration of lands 
and dwellings. ... 1 look on such im- 
provement as directly tending to endear 
the land to the inhabitant." The follow- 
ing sentence might have been written 
yesterday, so consistent is it with the 
thought of to-day : " Whatever events 
in progress shall go to disgust men with 
cities, and infuse into them the passion 
for country life and country pleasures, 
will render a service to the whole face 
of this continent, and will further the 
most poetic of all the occupations of real 
life, the bringing out by art the native 
but hidden graces of the landscape." In 
regard to books, pictures, statues, collec- 
tions in natural history, and all such re- 



112 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

fining objects of nature and art, which 
heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, 
Emerson pointed out that in America the 
public should provide these means of 
culture and inspiration for every citizen. 
He thus anticipated the present owner- 
ship by cities, or by endowed trustees, 
of parks, gardens, and museums of art 
or science, as well as of baths and orches- 
tras. Of music in particular he said : " I 
think sometimes could I only have music 
on my own terms ; could I . . . know 
where I could go whenever I wished the 
ablution and inundation of musical waves, 
— that were a bath and a medicine." It 
has been a long road from that sentence, 
written probably in the forties, to the 
Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to 
the new singing classes on the East Side 
of New York City. 

For those of us who have attended to 



EMERSON 113 

the outburst of novels and treatises on 
humble or squalid life, to the copious 
discussions on child-study, to the masses 
of slum literature, and to the numerous 
writings on home economics, how true 
to-day seems the following sentence writ- 
ten in 1837 : " The literature of the poor, 
the feelings of the child, the philosophy 
of the street, the meaning of household 
life are the topics of the time." 

I pass now to the last of the three 
topics which time permits me to discuss, 
— Emerson's religion. In no field of 
thought was Emerson more prophetic, 
more truly a prophet of coming states 
of human opinion, than in religion. In 
the first place, he taught that religion 
is absolutely natural, — not supernatural, 
but natural : — 

" Out from the heart of Nature rolled 

The burdens of the Bible old." 
8 



114 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

He believed that revelation is natural and 
continuous, and that in all ages prophets 
are born. Those souls out of time pro- 
claim truth, which may be momentarily 
received with reverence, but is neverthe- 
less quickly dragged down into some 
savage interpretation which by and by 
a new prophet will purge away. He be- 
lieved that man is guided by the same 
power that guides beast and flower. 
" The selfsame power that brought me 
here brought you," he says to beautiful 
Rhodora. For him worship is the atti- 
tude of those "who see that against all 
appearances the nature of things works 
for truth and right forever." He saw 
good not only in what we call beauty, 
grace, and light, but in what we call foul 
and ugly. For him a sky-born music 
sounds " from all that s fair ; from all 
that 's foul : " — 



EMERSON 115 

" *T is not in the high stars alone, 

Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, 

Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
But in the mud and scum of things 
There alway, alway something sings." 

The universe was ever new and fresh in 
his eyes, not spent, or fallen, or degraded, 
but eternally tending upward : — 

" No ray is dimmed, no atom worn. 
My oldest force is good as new. 
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 

Gives back the bending heavens in dew," 

When we come to his interpretation of 
historical Christianity, we find that in his 
view the life and works of Jesus fell en- 
tirely within the field of human experi- 
ence. He sees in the deification of Jesus 
an evidence of lack of faith in the infini- 
tude of the individual human soul. He 
sees in every gleam of human virtue not 
only the presence of God, but some atom 



116 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

of His nature. As a preacher he had no 
tone of authority. A true non-conformist 
himself, he had no desire to impose his 
views on anybody. Rehgious truth, like 
all other truth, was to his thought an un- 
rolling picture, not a deposit made once 
for all in some sacred vessel. When 
people who were sure they had drained 
that vessel, and assimilated its contents, 
attacked him, he was irresponsive or im- 
passive, and yielded to them no juicy 
thought ; so they pronounced him dry or 
empty. Yet all of Emerson's religious 
teaching led straight to God, — not to 
a withdrawn creator, or anthropomor- 
phic judge or king, but to the all-inform- 
ing, all-sustaining soul of the universe. 

It was a prophetic quality of Emerson's 
religious teaching that he sought to ob- 
literate the distinction between secular 
and sacred. For him all things were 



EMERSON 117 

sacred, just as the universe was religious. 
We see an interesting fruition of Emer- 
son's sowing in the nature of the means 
of influence, which organized churches 
and devout people have, in these later 
days, been compelled to resort to. Thus 
the Catholic Church keeps its hold on its 
natural constituency quite as much by 
schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, entertain- 
ments, and social parades as it does by 
its rites and sacraments. The Protestant 
Churches maintain in city slums '* settle- 
ments," which use the secular rather than 
the so-called sacred methods. The fight 
against drunkenness, and the sexual vice 
and crimes of violence which follow in its 
train, is most successfully maintained by 
eliminating its physical causes and pro- 
viding mechanical and social protections. 
For Emerson inspiration meant not the 
rare conveyance of supernatural power to 



118 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

an individual, but the constant incoming 
into each man of the "divine soul which 
also inspires all men." He believed in the 
worth of the present hour : — 

" Future or Past no richer secret folds, 
O friendless Present ! than thy bosom holds." 

He believed that the spiritual force of 
human character imaged the divine: — 

"The sun set, but set not his hope : 
Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye." 

Yet man is not an order of nature, but 
a stupendous antagonism, because he 
chooses and acts in his soul. *' So far as 
a man thinks, he is free." It is interest- 
ing to-day, after all the long discussion of 
the doctrine of evolution, to see how 
the much earlier conceptions of Emer- 
son match the thoughts of the latest 



EMERSON 119 

exponents of the philosophic results of 
evolution. 

The present generation of scholars and 
ministers has been passing through an 
important crisis in regard to the sacred 
books of Judaism and Christianity. All 
the features of the contest over " the 
higher criticism " are foretold by Emer- 
son in " The American Scholar." " The 
poet chanting was felt to be a divine man ; 
henceforth the chant is divine also. The 
writer was a just and wise spirit ; hence- 
forward it is settled the book is perfect. 
Colleges are built on it ; books are written 
on it. . . . Instantly the book becomes 
noxious ; the guide is a tyrant." This is 
exactly what has happened to Protestant- 
ism, which substituted for infallible Pope 
and Church an infallible Book ; and this 
is precisely the evil from which modern 
scholarship is delivering the world. 



120 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

In religion Emerson was only a nine- 
teenth-century non-conformist instead of 
a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. 
It was a fundamental article in his creed 
that, although conformity is the virtue in 
most request, "Whoso would be a man 
must be a non-conformist." In the midst 
of increasing luxury, and of that easy- 
going, unbelieving conformity which is 
itself a form of luxury, Boston, the 
birthplace of Emerson, may well remem- 
ber with honor the generations of non- 
conformists who made her, and created 
the intellectual and moral climate in 
which Emerson grew up. Inevitably, to 
conformists and to persons who still accept 
doctrines and opinions which he rejected, 
he seems presumptuous and consequential. 
In recent days we have even seen the word 
" insolent " applied to this quietest and 
most retiring of seers. But have not all 



EMERSON 121 

prophets and ethical teachers had some- 
thing of this aspect to their conservative 
contemporaries ? We hardly expect the 
messages of prophets to be welcome ; they 
imply too much dissatisfaction w^ith the 
present. 

The essence of Emerson's teaching con- 
cerning man's nature is compressed into 
the famous verse : — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust. 
So near is God to man. 
When Duty whispers low. Thou must. 
The youth replies, I can." 

The cynic or the fall-of-man theologian 
replies — Grandeur indeed, say rather 
squalor and shame. To this ancient pes- 
simism Emerson makes answer with a 
hard question — " We grant that human 
life is mean, but how did we find out that 
it was mean ? " To this question no 
straight answer has been found, the com- 



122 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

mon answer running in a circle. It is 
hard indeed to conceive of a measure 
which will measure depths but not heights ; 
and besides, every measure implies a 
standard. 

I have endeavored to set before you 
some of the practical results of Emerson's 
visions and intuitions, because, though 
quite unfit to expound his philosophical 
views, I am capable of appreciating some 
of the many instances in which his words 
have come true in the practical experience 
of my own generation. My own work has 
been a contribution to the prosaic, concrete 
work of building, brick by brick, the new 
walls of old American institutions of edu- 
cation. As a young man I found the 
writings of Emerson unattractive, and not 
seldom unintelligible. I was concerned 
with physical science, and with routine 



EMERSON 123 

teaching and discipline ; and Emerson's 
thinking seemed to me speculative and 
visionary. In regard to religious belief, 
I was brought up in the old-fashioned 
Unitarian conservatism of Boston, which 
was rudely shocked by Emerson's excur- 
sions beyond its well-fenced precincts. But 
when I had got at what proved to be my 
life work for education, I discovered in 
Emerson's poems and essays all the funda- 
mental motives and principles of my own 
hourly struggle against educational routine 
and tradition, and against the prevailing 
notions of discipline for the young ; so 
when I was asked to speak to you to-night 
about him, although I realized my unfit- 
ness in many respects for such a function, 
I could not refuse the opportunity to point 
out how many of the sober, practical un- 
dertakings of to-day had been anticipated 
in all their principles by this solitary, 



124 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

shrewd, independent thinker, who, in 
an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory 
way, wrought out many sentences and 
verses which will travel far down the 
generations. 

I was also interested in studying in this 
example the quality of prophets in general. 
We know a good deal about the intellec- 
tual ancestors and inspirers of Emerson ; 
and we are sure that he drank deep at 
many springs of idealism and poetry. 
Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare, and Milton 
were of his teachers ; Oken, Lamarck, and 
Lyell lent him their scientific theories; 
and Channing stirred the residuum which 
came down to him through his forbears 
from Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. All 
these materials he transmuted and mould- 
ed into lessons which have his own indi- 
vidual quality and bear his stamp. The 
precise limits of his individuality are inde- 



EMERSON 125 

terminable, and inquiry into them would 
be unprofitable. In all probability the 
case would prove to be much the same 
with most of the men that the world 
has named prophets, if we knew as much 
of their mental history as we know of 
Emerson's. With regard to the Semitic 
prophets and seers, it is reasonable to 
expect that as Semitic exploration and 
discovery advance, the world will learn 
much about the historical and poetical 
sources of their inspiration. Then the 
Jewish and Christian peoples may come 
nearer than they do now to Emerson's 
conceptions of inspiration and worship, 
of the naturalness of revelation and re- 
ligion, and of the infinite capacities of 
man. Meantime, it is an indisputable 
fact that Emerson's thought has proved 
to be consonant with the most progres- 
sive and fruitful thinking and acting of 



126 FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS 

two generations since his working time. 
This fact, and the sweetness, fragrance, 
and loftiness of his spirit, prophesy for 
him an enduring power in the hearts and 
lives of spiritually-minded men. 



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